911 dispatchers rarely have a reason to laugh on the job. 90 percent of the time, they’re a lifeline for the person on the other end of the line. That’s why 911 dispatchers are often referred to as “invisible first responders.”
But every now and then, someone calls with an issue that has nothing to do with life or death. Instead, it’s something a lot more - well, comical. Take a read through our list of the 6 funniest 911 calls in recent memory.
In Greenville, S.C. a 911 dispatcher received a phone call from someone who sounded like a baby, according to a local news channel. Police responded to the call to make sure everything was ok, ending up at a house where an elderly man answered the door - followed by his two-year-old granddaughter, Aliyah, who had just one pant leg on. It turned out she’d called 911 to get help putting on the rest of her pants.
The grandfather had no idea that Aliyah had called 911 and apologized, but the officer who responded was happy to sit down with Aliyah and help her get dressed.
One Oklahoma dispatcher got a very strange call one day: a woman had opened her toilet seat and discovered a squirrel swimming around in it. Instead of calling a wildlife rehabilitator, which might have made more sense, the woman called 911.
Shortly afterward, police arrived on scene to apprehend the soggy animal and get him safely out of the toilet and into the hands of wildlife experts.
What do you do if you hear strange noises in the house you happen to be robbing? Call 911, of course (or the Romanian version of 911, as that’s where this occurred).
A thief got spooked by strange sounds while robbing a house, and called to report the sounds to the police. The police arrived, but they weren’t too concerned about the sounds when they saw what the man was doing. They arrested him and the man went to prison. And the sounds? They were being made by the homeowner’s pet cat.
In Portland, Ore. a man broke into someone’s house to take a shower - or at least, that’s what he was doing when the homeowner came home and found him in the bathroom. Not only did the homeowner call 911, but the intruder did too. He was scared, he said, that the homeowner might have a gun.
There’s no report on whether the homeowner did, in fact, have a gun, but the police officers who arrested the intruder certainly did.
One woman called 911 over a fast food emergency: Burger King had messed up her order of a Western BBQ Burger, and she just had to get it fixed even if it meant calling the police.
The dispatcher displayed quite a bit of patience as the woman listed all her complaints about the Burger King employees and the manager. Finally, the dispatcher told her that police would not be responding and advised her to speak to the manager herself.
This good advice wasn’t much appreciated by the caller, who said that the police were supposed to be there to protect her. Even, it appears, from mistaken fast food orders.
In Greenfield, Wis. a distraught woman called to say she and her husband were basically being held hostage … by their cat.
By the time the woman called, the cat had attacked her husband and they’d retreated to the bedroom where they locked themselves in, safely protected from the crazy feline. Officers responded and the cat was taken by Animal Control.
Oddly enough, this isn’t the only cat-related 911 call on record. A woman in Florida also called 911 to report being held hostage by her Russian Blue cat.
Want to read more of our blog posts for 911 and PSAP workers? Check out “Hiring Tips for PSAP Managers,” “Preparing Your PSAP for NG911 Compliance,” and “Why PSAPs Should Be Using the U.S. National Grid to Find 911 Callers.”
In every industry, organizations have to find effective, accurate ways to measure their performance.
For certain industries, this can be fairly straightforward. Take retail, for instance. Retailers can measure daily, weekly, and monthly sales figures to get an accurate idea of how they’re performing compared to last month or last year.
Contact centers can measure things like First Call Resolution and Call Abandonment rates to gauge their customers’ level of satisfaction.
But in the public safety industry, measuring performance is often much more nuanced. Sure, there are certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be easily tracked, but how do you measure citizen satisfaction, or citizens’ feeling of safety? These questions are much more challenging to answer.
Here are a few tips for effectively measuring your own public safety organization’s performance.
With today’s technology, we’re able to collect truly massive amounts of data.
And we don’t just have to go through traditional channels anymore: citizens are reporting crimes, quality of life issues, and public safety problems via social media, while the internet has made gathering data through surveys and other formal requests easier than ever.
While this has given public safety organizations plenty of information to work with, it also means they have to figure out how to use it. This can require additional resources, whether in the form of personnel, technology, or time.
These can be hard sells in an era when budget cuts continue to plague most government agencies. However, it’s not impossible - take this example from an article in City Smart Data Solutions. Back in 2011, the Santa Cruz Police Department was suffering from a 30 percent hike in calls they received while dealing with 20 percent less staff than they’d had since 2000.
As they were dealing with short resources, they had to think creatively about how to address this problem. So they decided to hire a mathematician and professor to develop a formula for predicting future crimes. This creative use of data allowed the department to continue to serve its population well, even though they were understaffed.
Each public safety agency, from fire to police to Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) has specific performance measures, or KPIs, that it keeps track of.
But how do you know whether you’re keeping track of the right ones - the ones that will optimally inform your organization’s policies?
One way to do this is to compare your KPIs to those of other similar agencies. A PSAP, for example, could compare its KPIs to those tracked by another PSAP that serves a comparable population, as well as another PSAP located in a nearby town.
Not only can this offer PSAP managers a bigger-picture view of their industry as a whole, but it can also facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas and strategies that benefit all parties involved.
The right technology can make collecting and sorting through all your public safety data much, much easier. Take speech analytics technology: with Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety’s optional speech analytics capability, 911 calls are transcribed and then made searchable.
Using guided, visual search tools, the software can help users identify trends and insights hidden within related calls, as well as areas that need improvement. Verint Media Recorder’s speech analytics tool is also useful in identifying training opportunities to improve call-taker performance.
There are also excellent social media analytics tools available to help public safety organizations make sense of the information they receive online almost constantly from citizens.
Without some kind of analytics software or service, it can be nearly impossible to gain even a fraction of the usable intelligence that’s available.
To learn more about how data can best inform your public safety agency’s practices, read our whitepaper “Speech Analytics in Today’s Emergency Communications Center.”
We’ve all heard about how important analytics are to running a successful contact center. With the incredible amount of data that’s now available to track, there’s no excuse for not taking advantage of it.
But there’s a potential downside to having all this access to trackable data, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). How do you know which KPIs you should be tracking? You’ve got limited time and resources, after all - you don’t want to waste any time measuring something that won’t help you in the long run.
While each contact center will have certain KPIs that are more important for them to measure than others, in general, these are a few of the KPIs that your center should be tracking for maximum success.
Your call abandonment rate is how many of your callers hang up before being connected to an agent. This is a very important KPI to track, as it will tell you how many of your callers are becoming frustrated with long hold times.
If your call abandonment rate is high, it may point to a need for more agents or for changes in your staffing. A workforce optimization suite, like the Verint Workforce Optimization suite, can help you track and manage your staffing resources so that you’ve got the adequate number of people available to handle your highest-volume call times.
Like your call abandonment rate, this KPI will give you an idea of how satisfied your customers are and whether or not they’re likely to stay your customers.
No caller wants to spend valuable time tethered to the phone, listening to canned music while they wait for an agent to answer.
Keeping track of this KPI - which is found by dividing the total amount of time callers wait in queues by the total number of calls your agents answer - will help you determine whether your agents are providing your customers with the best possible service. It will also give you an idea of whether your agents have the tools and training they need to do their jobs well.
First call resolution - or the percentage of customers whose issues are resolved with a single phone call, without any need for a transfer or follow-up - has been found to have the highest impact on customer satisfaction, according to Ameyo. Each 1 percent improvement in FCR results in a 1 percent improvement in customer satisfaction. This kind of one-to-one cause and effect relationship is rare when it comes to KPIs, and should be capitalized upon.
One thing you can do to improve your FCR is ensure that your agents have access to a robust knowledge management portal. This will ensure that they can easily find the information they need to help your customers as quickly as possible.
It’s no secret that contact centers often experience high agent turnover rates.
While turnover can be a headache for managers, who must continually find and train new agents, it can also have a negative impact on customer satisfaction. Team morale may also suffer.
When contact centers are understaffed, even for short periods of time, agents’ workloads and stress levels can be significantly increased, so you want to keep an eye on this KPI and consider what you can do to reduce turnover as much as possible.
Tracking KPIs is a vital part of managing your contact center’s success and increasing your customer satisfaction. For more information on contact center KPIs, read our post “Establishing Your Contact Center KPIs.”
Contact centers spend a lot of time and energy getting everything just right. Using analytics, they can find the best scheduling during times of heavy call traffic and even change how their agents respond to customers’ problems. Having your contact center running efficiently during normal times is a great goal, but what happens when something goes wrong? How can you prevent a disaster when calls spike and your system is overloaded? Here’s how you can be as prepared as possible.
Testing Your Capabilities
You know what your contact center can normally handle, and maybe even a little past that, but do you know what will happen if incoming calls spike far past normal levels? Depending on what business you’re in, your contact center might have annual spikes (possibly due to weather) and you have to be prepared for the worst.
That’s why you need to test that scenario well in advance. A lot can change since the last time you had a surge in your calls, and these tests can help you spot unforeseen problems. The last thing you want is to be in the middle of a huge uptick in calls, only to realize that the new tech you implemented can’t handle the stress. You should always be prepared for the worst-case scenario. That way you can’t get surprised, even when things aren’t going well.
Think About The Customer
With a huge surge in calls comes the problem of delivering great customer service. And if you aren’t getting your customers what they want now, then you’re probably not going to do very well when traffic is at an all-time high. That’s when you’re the most vulnerable for negative reviews from customers online, loss of business, and a damaged reputation. Part of this may include surveying your customers to find out their level of satisfaction and what you can do better. But you can also look at the data from your calls and use analytics to find the areas where you could be doing better. You might not be perfect when that worst-case scenario rolls around, but you’ll miles ahead of where you would have been.
Keep Testing
The best way to keep your contact center out of a disastrous situation is through vigilance. Maybe you know when a spike in calls is coming, and maybe you don’t. The only way you’ll be truly ready is if you keep testing your capabilities, keep updating your software, and stay on the lookout for trouble. A prepared contact center will be able to weather a surge in calls without turning it into a disaster for the company.
The only true way to prevent disasters in your contact center is to stay proactive. You can’t stop everything, but you just might keep yourself out of trouble when the calls begin rolling in. Contact KOVA today if you’d like more information on how you can keep your contact center running smoothly, even during the worst call traffic.
Big data has become a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. That’s because analytics are making it easier to gather huge amounts of information and sort through them. A task that would have taken a prohibitive amount of time can now be done quite quickly. But there’s a problem. Just because you’re able to gather vast amounts of data, and even sort through it, that doesn’t mean that you’re getting actionable information out of it.
Analytics for a contact center can be hugely beneficial, allowing managers to take thousands of calls and analyze them for trends. And that can be overwhelming when you first begin using analytics. How do you get information that you can actually use out of all this data, and use it to enhance your caller’s experience?
Decide What You Want
If you’re new to big data, you may be thinking that you’ll collect all of this information, apply analytics, and then unforeseen insights will suddenly come out of that data. And yes, you might be able to spot some trends that you didn’t already know about, but you’ll get more out of it if you already know what you’re trying to learn. Basically, know what you want to learn from your data ahead of time instead of just hoping you’ll come across something.
Remember The Context
Even when you find an insight in all of that data, remember what’s going on in real life. Maybe you find a problem with call length when customers call about a certain product. That could mean your agents aren’t handling the problem well, or it could mean that the answer is to their question is simply more complex. Don’t act on data without making sure you have the proper context surrounding it.
Make It Clear
This will probably come as no surprise, but it’s tough to turn a wall of data into something actionable that your agents and back office can actually use. Once you have the data you need, and you’ve got a plan in place, make it clear and give your employees a visual that they can refer to.
Act On It
If you’ve got information that says you should change a policy, schedule agents differently, or train them for different situations, then now’s the time to do it. The problem with big data is that the sheer amount of it can easily be overwhelming. If you know you’ve done everything right and you’ve come up with something actionable that can improve your contact center, then you should move on it.
Your contact center has plenty of data that you can use to improve customer service. You just have to know how to successfully use analytics, and how to finally act when you come a conclusion.
At KOVA, we’re experts at getting businesses the software they need to successfully gain actionable intelligence from big data. So contact KOVA today if you’re ready to start using the power of analytics in your contact center.
Public safety is a complex topic that covers quite a bit of ground. It’s the combination of all the different and distinct ways in which we try to make society a safer and better place. When all the different facets of public safety come together and work as one, that’s when we achieve the highest level of safety and security in a community. The blogs we’re going to show you help to accomplish this goal by showing off the latest developments, talking about new technology, and discussing the many ways we can make our public safety systems even better. Take a look.
In Public Safety
Sponsored by the American Military University, In Public Safety features in-depth discussions penned by leading experts with experience in the field. It covers and offers analysis on issues from law enforcement and emergency management, to fire services and national intelligence. It even offers training and educational opportunities for public safety professionals looking to hone their skills and stay up to date on the latest trends. There’s something here for anyone involved in public safety at the professional level, and the blog looks at the field through a variety of different viewpoints.
Motorola Fresh Ideas In Public Safety
Motorola’s blog on public safety offers plenty of intelligent and fresh insights on public safety from experts in the field. Public safety trends can change quickly when new technology makes its presence felt, and Motorola is in a perfect position to use its experience with wireless technology and communication equipment to keep public safety professionals informed about the latest news in their field.
911 Magazine
On the site, 911 Magazine describes their mission as such—“ To educate, inform and inspire the emergency communications community; to find solutions to 9-1-1 and dispatch center management through authoritative, timely, and independent reporting and analysis.” Their blog is a fantastic online resource for anyone in emergency communications and response. From dispatchers to PSAP supervisors and management, everyone in the industry can find something useful at the site.
Officer.com
It’s important not to forget that the most essential part of public safety is the people hired to actually protect us. There’s no substitute for a good police force, and Officer.com is a comprehensive site dedicated to informative posts about officer related topics. Topics range from firearms to new technology to training and careers. The site covers just about everything that an officer needs to know.
Urgent Communications
Focusing more on the communications technology side of things, Urgent Communications is the best resource out there for learning about and discussing new communications technology for PSAPs and other public safety communication end users. Follow their blog to stay on the cutting edge of new technology and trends in the industry.
Staying on top of everything that’s going on in the public safety industry today isn’t an easy task. These blogs will help, but if you’d like to learn more, then contact KOVA today. We have the knowledge and expertise to help you implement the perfect public safety software solution for your needs.
Not everyone knows it, but there are some serious issues with the ability of emergency call takers to find the location of 911 callers in the United States. The problem stems from the fact that the 911 system in the U.S. was developed with technology from around 40 years ago, when everyone had a landline, and the caller literally had to be in the building associated with the phone they were calling from.
A lot has changed since then, and now a majority of 911 calls come from cell phones, which aren’t tethered to any particular area or building. This means that when callers don’t know their own location—they can’t find street signs, are in a different city or neighborhood, or find themselves in an area without many identifying features—it can actually be very difficult for responders to find their location.
That might seem odd, seeing as we all have apps for finding our phones, tracking our location, and even tracking our friends’ locations, but PSAPs in the U.S. desperately need an upgrade, and that costs a lot of money that they aren’t necessarily getting.
So why is the U.S. National Grid so important? The USNG is the official coordinate system used for search and rescue in the United States. When someone calls 911, PSAPs that use this technology can use the caller’s device’s GPS to generate USNG coordinates. Usable data is anywhere from 8-13 characters, and it can generate a coordinate that identifies the caller’s position within 10 meters—a small enough area that they can easily be found.
There are a few benefits to using the USNG to find callers. For one thing, it’s an easy system for both the caller and the PSAP. It’s also the national standard, and has been the coordinate system for land search and rescue since 2011.
The system isn’t automatic, but if the caller has a smartphone, they can pull up the site and find their coordinates, or preferably, have the app saved on their phone to streamline the process. USNGAPP.ORG will work on a phone without internet connectivity as long as it has been used once before on that device. That makes it ideal for rural areas and other environments where data service is spotty or nonexistent and recognizable landmarks may be few and far between.
The race to upgrade PSAP technology and bring 911 call centers up to date with cell phone use is vital to our safety and security as a nation. When PSAPs implement the U.S. National Grid as part of their existing technology, it gives them another option for finding cell phone users in emergency situations.
If your PSAP is looking to upgrade software and technology, then look no further than KOVA. Our public safety software gives government, public, and enterprise organizations the actionable security information they need to be effective in their emergency response, investigations, and analysis. Contact us today to find out how public safety software solutions from KOVA can benefit your PSAP.
Your frontline and back office have different jobs to do, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s because they work in two different environments. Your frontline agents work in real time, meaning a problem arises and they take the call and attempt to resolve it. They work to pursue immediate resolution, taking calls as they come unless a backlog develops during periods of heavy activity.
In the back office, employees may be performing work or tasks that don’t involve having direct contact with customers. Tasks in the back office may take days or even weeks to complete, and they aren’t necessarily looking to resolve an immediate conflict.
Many times this can lead to a feeling of separation between the two. They know the other is necessary, but they don’t have a specific use for each other at most times. This isn’t ideal, because when an issue does arise that requires collaboration between the frontline and back office, you don’t have the structure or relationships in place to easily resolve the issue and move ahead. Instead, you have a lot of back and forth that doesn’t accomplish much, while distracting both teams from their primary goals.
So what are the upsides to collaboration between the two? For one thing, you’ll be providing better customer service. Your frontline may handle the customers individually, but it takes the entire contact center to provide excellent customer service over a long period of time. Collaboration between the two leads to the proper sharing of information, meaning that frontline agents have what they need to resolve a situation without waiting on the back office.
When you have collaboration between the frontline and the back office, you’ll also notice that employees are happier and perform better. That’s because each side understands the objectives of the other, and also knows how each role supports the other. You want your entire team to be working in sync, not like two different sides with their own independent goals.
And if you want to really achieve collaboration in your contact center, then you should be investing in workforce optimization solutions. These solutions can help your business improve the way the frontline and back office work together by:
Collaboration between your frontline and back office is absolutely necessary if you want your contact center to run as efficiently and productively as possible.
Workforce optimization solutions from Kova facilitate the capture and process of critical information about work output and customers, revealing areas of opportunity, and providing the insights that produce measurable results. So contact Kova today if you’d like to hear more about how our workforce optimization solutions can benefit your contact center.
There’s a lot that goes into building a successful contact center culture—from training and hiring practices to the software that you use. One of the newer developments in contact center best practices is the integration of social media. Social media isn’t anything new at this point, but using it in your contact center may be something you’ve shied away from up until now. That’s because it has to be a tailored approach that fits your business and what your customers are expecting out of your contact center.
One of the reasons that it’s so important to integrate social media into your contact center is that social media itself is a disruptive factor when it comes to resolution of customer problems. People no longer only have the option of calling your contact center and speaking with a representative to find the answer to their solution. If they’re put on hold, or they aren’t happy with the answer they get, they turn to the web.
And if you don’t have any type of presence online they can use to resolve their issue, then your customers will turn to social media in order to ask a vast group of online users what the answer is. This is obviously not something you want to happen. Your customers should be getting their information from you, not a random person or business online that thinks they know the answer. The point is, even if you aren’t on social media, your customers are.
When you begin integrating social media into your practices, you have to understand that there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, just like everything else. You don’t want to simply assign an agent the task of watching over the Facebook page in addition to their normal duties. And you also shouldn’t just create a Facebook and call it a day. The challenge is that tackling social media for a large company or organization requires actual integration of those social media platforms into the contact center.
This means coordinating all your different customer service channels and making sure that there are set rules for interactions that ultimately lead to good customer service. That means that the information that customers receive on the phone should be the same information that they receive on social media. Any inconsistencies look sloppy and create frustrations for your customers. When all your customer service channels are working in sync, you’ll find that issues are resolved quicker and with less trouble for both you and the customer.
Integrating social media into your contact center may seem like a daunting task, but with the right mindset and the right software, you’ll find that you have a new way to better serve your customers. So contact Kova today if you’re thinking about making the leap and integrating social media in your contact center. We’ve been helping contact centers just like yours increase their efficiency and provide better customer service.
